Page 163 of Loving the Tormentor

I blink at him, my heart racing, my vision narrowing as I get dizzy. Losing all feeling in my legs, I put a hand out, looking for something to stop me from dropping like dead weight.

I don't find anything, and he's the one who wraps an arm around my waist.

"Hey, hey, breathe for me," he orders calmly. "I'm here."

"Y-You're…"

"Breathe," he repeats in a reassuring voice that doesn't sound like him. "I need you to survive the shock."

He takes a deep breath, so I follow his lead, his lungs clearly working. Like a man who'salive.

"You’re alive," I say as I exhale.

"Believe me,mon trésor, I wasn't until just now."

I put a hand on his chest, and I feel it. His heart isbeating.

"Achilles Duval." A sob bursts out of my mouth. "Even in death, you torture me, youfucking asshole!"

"Mama!" a tiny voice shouts from behind him.

Both our eyes widen at the same time as a little girl wobbles a few steps from my father to me, coming to hug my leg. I instinctively let him go to pick her up since she can’t properly walk yet, and some of my energy comes back. I can't faint on her.

He looks at her short black hair in two pigtails on top of her head, her wide brown eyes, and his gaze comes back to me.

"Nyx," he says in a deep voice that almost sounds like a threat. "Who is this?"

"This is Lyra," I croak. "My daughter."

His mouth falls open. There’s no way in hell someone could wonder if Lyra is Achilles's daughter. She might not have his eyes, but the beautiful aristocratic traits, the arrogance in the way she carries herself when she can’t even talk, the confidence and power she emanates. It’s all him.

"I named her after the lyre the Greek hero Achilles used to play as a child. He loved that lyre so, so dearly," I finally say.

Chapter Forty-Three

Achilles

dancing with a silhouette – Dominic Donner

Nyx will say learning I'm still alive is the greatest shock, but I believe finding out I have a second daughter is a close second.

We're lying in bed,our bed, at the lake house, and I still can't believe I'm here, with her head resting on my chest, and the scent of the beach and the sun invading my nostrils.Thisfeels like home.

My mother took Sophie, and Lena took Lyra after the graduation so Nyx and I could talk. But the second we crossed the front door, all questions were put to the side as the need to reconnect with each other took over. I rediscovered her body, the new scars, the change in her curves following the pregnancy. She's as gorgeous as she's ever been, as delicious…just asmine. I caress her ribs and read the tattoo there again.I'm a dreamer.Her one and only tattoo.

She sits up, holding the sheets to her chest. She's still looking at me like I'm a ghost, and in some sense, I am to her.

"Where were you?" She chokes up, blinking away tears. "Achilles, what happened that for almost two years you couldn't give me a single sign of life? That you let me suffer a pain no one should ever have to suffer?"

I sit up too, lying back against the pillows. It's strange yet familiar to be back on my side of the best. I counted the nights I spent without her, waking up every morning, hoping I could contact her. The wait was unimaginable. The longing was torture.

"I had to disappear," I finally say. "I had promised myself I would destroy the Circle, and there was only one way to do it, to keep going with my original plan. But they all knew I was Hermes. My father said it himself that night, that they all wanted me dead. Once I exposed them to the world, they would’ve killed me, just like they killed each other when it all happened. I wanted to die by my own hand."

She looks for something in my eyes. That pain I used to have. She won't find it.

"But you didn't die," she says. "You hid."

"Hiding wasn't part of the plan. Only death was."